The Theory in 10 Claims

A short, plain-language introduction to Interaction Theory. Each claim gets a one-sentence statement, a few sentences of unpacking, and one concrete example. If something here intrigues you, the deeper material is one click away.

1. Reality is made of one thing: interaction.

Not particles, not fields, not minds — none of these is fundamental. Everything that exists is some pattern of interactions; "things" are just stable configurations we give names to.

Example: "Atom" is a name for a stable pattern of proton-electron interactions. Stop the interactions and there is no atom left to point at — only the pattern was the thing.

2. Every interaction has the same shape: A leaves a mark, B becomes aware.

Two poles. One leaves an impression on its surroundings; the other registers it. That is the whole atomic event.

Example: A photon leaves the surface of the sun, traverses local space, and is registered by your retina. The photon (A) leaves; the retina (B) becomes aware. That whole event is one interaction.

3. An interaction does not exist until B becomes aware.

Before awareness, nothing has happened. There is no half-event hanging around waiting to be completed. The whole interaction springs into being at the moment of awareness.

Example: A tree falls in a forest where nothing registers it. On this theory, no falling-event has occurred at all — until something is aware of the mark it would have left.

4. Time only exists inside interactions.

There is no universal clock. Each interaction carries its own internal duration; what we feel as "time flowing" is a synthesis of all the interactions we are part of.

Example: Boring meetings drag, exciting movies fly. The theory says there is not one true time being distorted by the brain — there is just a re-weighting of which internal times we attend to.

5. The universe itself is one giant interaction.

The Big Bang is the moment its A-pole left a mark. The end of the universe is when its B-pole will become aware. Everything we can observe is happening inside this one event, in its internal space and time.

Example: Cosmic history is the inside of one interaction. We will never see the mark it produces or the awareness that receives it — we are inside the protocol, with no exterior view.

6. A "thing" is a Form — a self-maintaining pattern.

Particles, cells, humans, societies — each is a Form, an arrangement of smaller Forms held together by a regular way of interacting. Forms are emergent, not fundamental. Every Form is a recipe for staying yourself, executed continuously.

Example: A whirlpool is not a thing; it is a pattern of water flow that persists as long as water keeps flowing through it. Forms are like that, but for everything — atoms, organisms, civilizations alike.

7. A Form exists only as long as it acts.

"Action" is not what a Form does on the side; it is the work that maintains the Form's existence. Stop acting and the Form dissolves back into the substrate. Existence at this level is active, never passive.

Example: A cell pumps ions, repairs membranes, replicates molecules — its action is its existence. Death is the action stopping; everything else follows from that. Descartes had I think therefore I am; the parallel here is I act therefore I am.

8. Alike Forms communicate through their shared lower-level interfaces.

Two Forms can interact directly with each other only because they have similar ways of interacting with what is below them. The shared lower-level interface becomes the medium for the higher-level conversation. Communication is always built on shared substrate.

Example: Two humans can talk to each other because both have ears that detect tiny air-molecule flows and vocal cords that produce them. Language is what stabilizes when two such humans develop regular patterns over those shared sound waves.

9. You can study what is beneath you, but you cannot see what is above.

You can dissect your own constituents — cells, molecules, atoms — all the way down. You cannot dissect the larger Forms you participate in: society, ecosystem, universe. The view is permanently asymmetric: science decomposes downward; what is above can only be inferred from its shadow on us.

Example: Biologists can study every organ in a body. Sociologists can describe society statistically but never decode its full internal propagation — because they are inside it, contributing to it, with no vantage point above.

10. Physics is the science of one big interaction's insides.

What we call physical law is a partial decoding of the universe-interaction's internal process. We can study its regularities; we cannot see the whole. Every science is, on this view, one or another local decoding of the same nested set of interactions.

Example: Newton's laws describe regularities inside the universe-interaction. They do not describe what the universe is "doing" or "for whom" — that mark is hidden from us by construction.

If something here caught you

These ten claims are the gist; the actual theory has more shape, more careful definitions, and more open questions. Here is where to climb deeper:

• Foundations — the full structure: the interaction script, the rooted tree of interactions, the Form-constitution rule, the autopoietic loop, the open mathematical questions.
• Epistemic Asymmetry — why claim #9 above is structural, not contingent. Every agent is a hub: one decipherable interior, many indecipherable exteriors.
• The Theory — long-form read-through combining both, in one continuous arc.
• Glossary — precise definitions of every technical term.
• Experiments — empirical / computational tests of the theory's predictions.

An evolving work, currently at version 0.12. The path from these ten claims to the full theory is well-trodden — read at whatever pace suits you.